Baby Born 84 Days After Mothers Death

Last night, while lying in bed and thinking about my Halloween articles, I was reading through the 1988 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records. While I was happily flipping the pages and feeling slightly ashamed over my lack of any records, I stumbled upon the craziest world record I have ever seen.

A woman, who had suffered a seizure and was pronounced clinically-dead, gave birth to a child 84 days after she died. As in, a corpse gave birth to a living child.

This is the torn, scanned page of my 1988 Guinness Book of World Records.

I’ll give you a moment to think that one over. Done? All right, lets take a look at exactly what this means.

I looked up the definition of clinically-dead and the definition does nothing to explain this phenomena. According to Wikipedia, Clinical death is the medical term for cessation of blood circulation and breathing, the two necessary criteria to sustain life.

Listen: Necessary criteria to sustain life. If blood circulation and breathing are the two basic functions needed to sustain life more basic than food and water then how did this corpse give birth to life? How did something that cannot even sustain its own life give birth to another life?

Is your mind blown yet? Because I’m about to have my own seizure over here.

As the record claims, the woman was kept alive via a breathing apparatus, like an iron lung or some other behemoth machine that whines and wheezes for you. Imagine a team of doctors pumping oxygen into a corpse for 84 days, monitoring the baby’s vital signs the whole time.

How did this team of doctors manage to keep the child alive? Eighty-four days of gestation is a long time, so how did they know she was pregnant? Where was the father? There are so many questions that this snippet leaves unanswered!

Unfortunately, I cannot find any further information on this topic. Never have I felt such depression from a Guinness World Record.

If you find any information, please drop me a comment. This mystery cannot remain unsolved.